I had a quick go at it, it’s maybe a bit fiddly to do some of the annotations but the app is definitely feature rich and with lots of potential uses, especially within an education scenario.

Here’s how an annotation webpage would look like using the Google Chrome bookmarklet:

Various other tools for creating annotations are made available too:

See also:

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world's leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

…

from BBC-news:

An OU spokesman said: “Just as there are different ways to dress, there are different ways to deliver education.”
He added: “As technology has changed, we have slowly phased out broadcasts of this course-related material. It’s a whole lot easier to send students DVDs or CDs than it is to get them to video programmes and watch them later. Now we have virtual learning environments and podcasts as well.”
Since its birth in January 1971, tens of thousands of course-related programmes have been shown, mainly at night. Initially 300 programmes were made with the BBC to cover four foundation courses for the new UK university.
Now, at the OU archives in Milton Keynes, some 92 metres worth of scripts are being kept for posterity.

The Open Universityâ€s commitment to broadening access to education is being taken to another level with the launch of OpenLearn, its major new open content initiative. The OpenLearn website will make educational resources freely available on the internet, with state of the art learning support and collaboration tools to connect learners and educators.

This £5.65 million project, supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will cover a full range of subjects from arts and history to science and nature, at all study levels from access to postgraduate. Available to learners and educators throughout the UK and worldwide, the project will be of particular significance in The Open Universityâ€s efforts to open access to hard-to-reach groups and tackle educational disadvantage both within the developed and developing worlds.

I registered and browsed some of the learning resources, there’s a lot of very interesting stuff. The other cool thing is that resources are usefully organized within a pedagogical context (that is, specifying learning outcomes, keywords, and so on for each of them). Plus, the whole suit of KMi-learning-tools !

A course on the meaning of the analogue/digital dychotomy…

And a course on Hume’s philosophy…

By the way, it’s worth having a (long) look at our main rival, the MIT Open CourseWare …